Alfred Dreyfus
Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), French army officer of Jewish birth. Found guilty in 1894 of espionage for Germany, he was condemned to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. The real traitor, Major Esterhazy, was acquitted. The blatant antisemitism of these verdicts caused violent controversy and after the suicide of an officer who had falsified important evidence, Dreyfus. was returned to France for retrial (1899). One of his supporters was the French writer Zola. Dreyfus was found guilty again but pardoned; he was not proclaimed innocent until 1906. Subsequently he fought in World War I and was appointed to the Legion of Honour in 1919.
